Editor’s Pick: CAD Data Translator Upgraded

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Disclaimer: A couple of years ago in the early stages of my solo career, I did some writing about Elysium for the Parker Group, one of the best PR outfits a company can find. I have not done any work for either organization in way more than a year. Today is no exception to that.

Now, back when I wrote an article and some other stuff for Elysium, I got the full skinny on CADfeature from the folks at Elysium — the type of briefing you might get before committing your enterprise to such a powerful toolset. So, let me say this about CADfeature: This is a powerful data translation system. And it is not for everyone. CADfeature is for those of you who absolutely have to have the design intent that lies in your legacy CAD files and in your client’s files. (Elysium also offers data translators for those of you with less demanding needs.)

CADfeature enables complete control over your translations so that you can preserve your design intent and control of your intellectual property. It provides control over your process — say, batch remastering, geometry-only conversions, feature suppression, and so forth. And it has a palette of capabilities for healing files.

Healing files? You might ask. Yeah, no system is perfect when it comes to data translation. Perfection is a mathematical impossibility because no two kernels are alike and no two CAD developers create tools that create features that are exactly the same on the code level. Dealing with that so that you have a remastered part or assembly from one CAD system for another is the power that CADfeature provides. It even identifies those areas that you need to correct before you’re in too far, saving you endless frustration and expense later on.

And it’s not all about receiving files to translate from your clients. CADfeature is also about translating your files for your supply chain partners. Here, its ability to work with most major CAD system formats becomes invaluable. Not only can you translate your data into a format that your downstream partner uses, you also can turn off features and protect your IP. Each of these characteristics can save you time and money; all of them can save you from a lot of headaches.

You can read more about the recently released 10.0 version of CADfeature from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. If you need full-powered CAD translation and control, then CADfeature is a system that you need to know about.